Jon Thorson - Ph.D.
Jon received his B.A. degree in chemistry (1986) from Augsburg College and a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry (1993) from the University of Minnesota with Professor Hung-wen (Ben) Liu. He held a postdoctoral appointment as a Merck Postdoctoral Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation (1993-1996) at the University of California, Berkeley with Professor Peter Schultz. From 1996-2001, Jon held appointments as an assistant member of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and assistant professor of Sloan-Kettering Division, Joan and Sanford I. Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences, Cornell University. In 2001 Professor Thorson moved to the University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy and during his tenure with UW, Jon was instrumental in establishing the Wisconsin Center for Natural Products Research, the NCI-supported UW National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group and the NATPRO Protein Structure Initiative. Professor Thorson joined the UK College of Pharmacy in the Fall of 2011 where he will also direct the new UK Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation. His research interests include understanding and exploiting biosynthetic pathways and enzyme mechanisms, bioorganic and chemoselective ligation chemistries, enzyme engineering and evolution, natural products discovery and bioprospecting. Professor Thorson has also been credited with establishing the general area of natural product glycorandomization and is a co-founder of the Madison-based biotechnology company Centrose.
Selected Honors
- NIH MERIT Award (2012-present)
- Laura and Edward Kremers Chair in Natural Products Chemistry (2009-2011)
- H.I. Romnes Fellow (2004-2009)
- Brainerd Distinguished Achievement Award (2005)
- American Society of Pharmacognosy Matt Suffness Young Investigator Award (2004)
- H. I. Romnes Fellow (2004)
- Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2000-2002)
- Rita Allen Foundation Scholar (1998-2002)
- Augsburg College Education for Service Alumni Award (1997)
Selected Publications/Presentations
2013 (all publications):
- Singh S, Chang A, Helmich KE, Bingman CA, Wrobel RL, Beebe ET, Makino S-I, Aceti DJ, Dyer K, Hura GL, Sunkara M, Morris AJ, Phillips Jr. GN, Thorson JS. Structural and functional characterization of CalS11, a TDP-rhamnose 3’-O-methyltransferase involved in calicheamicin biosynthesis. ACS Chem. Biol., 2013, in press.
- Gantt RW, Peltier-Pain P, Singh S, Zhou M, Thorson JS. Broadening the scope of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed sugar nucleotide synthesis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 2013, doi:10.1073/pnas.1220220110. (PMID23610417; NIHMSID in progress)
- Wang F, Zhou M, Singh S, Yennamalli RM, Bingman CA, Thorson JS, Phillips Jr. GN. Crystal structure of SsfS6, the putative C-glycosyltransferase involved in SF2575 biosynthesis. Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics 2013, doi:10.1002/prot.24289. (PMID23526584; NIHMSID in progress)
- Zhou M, Hamza A, Zhan C-G, Thorson JS. Assessing the regioselectivity of OleD-catalyzed glycosylation with a diverse set of acceptors. J. Nat. Prod. 2013, 76, 279-286. (PMID23360118; PMC3607945)
2000-2012 (representative selection from each year):
- Peltier-Pain P, Marchillo K, Zhou M, Andes DR, Thorson JS. Natural product disaccharide engineering through tandem glycosyltransferase catalysis reversibility and neoglycosylation. Org. Lett. 2012, 14, 5086-5089. (PMID22984807; PMC3489467)
- Gantt RW, Peltier-Pain P, Cournoyer WJ, Thorson JS. Using simple donors to drive the equilibria of glycosyltransferase-catalyzed reactions. Nat. Chem. Biol. 2011, 7, 685-689. (PMID21857660; PMC3177962)
- Goff RD, Thorson JS. An assessment of chemoselective neoglycosylation methods using chlorambucil as a model. J. Med. Chem. 2010, 53, 8129-8139. (PMID20973561; PMC2988911)
- Goff RD, Thorson JS. Enhancing the divergent activities of betulinic acid via neoglycosylation. Org. Lett. 2009, 11, 461-464. (PMID19102682; PMC2704577)
- Gantt RW, Goff RD, Williams GJ, Thorson JS. Probing the aglycon promiscuity of an engineered glycosyltransferase. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 8889-8892. (PMID18924204; PMC2963038)
- Williams GJ, Zhang C, Thorson JS. Expanding the promiscuity of a natural product glycosyltransferase by directed evolution. Nat. Chem. Biol. 2007, 3, 657-662. (PMID17828251)
- Zhang C, Griffith BR, Fu Q, Albermann C, Fu X, Lee IK, Li L, Thorson JS. Exploiting the reversibility of natural product glycosyltransferase-catalyzed reactions. Science 2006, 313, 1291-1294. (PMID16946071)
- Langenhan JM, Peters NR, Guzei IA, Hoffmann FM, Thorson JS. Enhancing the anti-cancer properties of cardiac glycosides via neoglycorandomization. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2005, 102, 12305-12310. (PMID16105948)
- Bililign T, Hyun C-G, Williams JS, Czisny AM, Thorson, JS. The hedamycin locus implicates a novel aromatic PKS priming mechanism. Chem. & Biol. 2004, 11, 959-969. (PMID15271354)
- Biggins JB, Onwueme KC, Thorson JS. The Mechanism of CalC: Resistance to enediyne antitumor antibiotics by self-sacrifice. Science 2003, 301, 1537-1541. (PMID12970566)
- Ahlert J, Shepard EM, Lomovskaya N, Zazopoulos E, Staffa A, Bachmann BO, Huang K, Yang X, Fonstein L, Czisny A, Whitwam RE, Farnet CM, Thorson JS. The calicheamicin gene cluster and its iterative type I enediyne PKS, Science 2002, 297, 1173-1176. (PMID12183629)
- Barton WA, Biggins JB, Lesniak J, Jeffrey PD, Jiang J, Rajashankar KR, Thorson JS, Nikolov DB. Structure, mechanism and active-site engineering of a nucleotidylyltransferase: The first step in the glycorandomization of natural product-based metabolites. Nat. Struct. Biol. 2001, 8, 2223-2226. (PMID11373625)
- Biggins JB, Prudent JR, Marshall DJ, Ruppen M, Thorson JS. A continuous assay for DNA cleavage: The application of “break lights” to enediynes, iron-dependent agents and nucleases. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2000, 97, 13537-13542. (PMID11095715)
